Cooler Talk

No reason to read a review of the Cool Kids. The band writes its own fairly accurate promotional copy—in the first verse of the song “One, Two,” the Cool Kids describe themselves as the “black version of the Beastie Boys.” Their show on Wednesday night, at Hiro Ballroom, didn’t entirely support this assertion, but it would not be shocking to see the Cool Kids opening for the Beastie Boys. (The Cool Kids open for M.I.A. tonight, at Terminal 5.) The era when the Beasties made their début is more than a fixation for the Cool Kids: this band is stalking an entire decade. Their song “88” is not about a piano, and the band’s Imeem page features a modified version of Run-DMC’s logo.

The Cool Kids are Mikey Rocks (né Antoine Reed), a nineteen-year-old from Matteson, Illinois, and Chuck (né Evan Ingersoll), a twenty-three-year-old from Mount Clemens, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The band reports, via e-mail, that “we actually met via MySpace and originally were only going to make beats and produce for other artists.” That doesn’t seem to be what happened. Check their MySpace page—you’ll see that they have created a substantial amount of noise for themselves. (Though both are producers, Chuck produced the Cool Kids tracks that are currently available.) Their songs sample the eighties directly, taking bits of Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid in Full” and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” itself something of a throwback to the sound of the first Beastie Boys album. If 1988 is not available, the Cool Kids will probably settle for 1989, a year for which they also express fondness, along with Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” and the New York night club Rooftop, a popular eighties venue that closed when these two young men were even younger.

At Hiro, it became clear that the band will not need nostalgia (or revivalism—they can’t be nostalgic for something they didn’t live through, right?) to make it. Mikey is a tall, lanky, handsome performer with a clear, strong voice. He was full of energy and immediately watchable. Chuck is shorter, and the more relaxed of the two. They were backed by a twenty-seven-year-old d.j. from Indianapolis named Patrick Jake, whom Mikey and Chuck described as “P.J.the d.j. a.k.a. V.I.P.J. is the one and only official d.j. of the Cool Kids.” The crowd, generally closer in age to the band than to this writer (who was twenty-one in 1988 and liked it even more than the Cool Kids do), could probably also hear that the band’s beats—spare, hard blips—recall the Neptunes as much as they do Mantronix. Right after Chuck gave a shout-out the Beastie Boys, Mikey Rocks said, “Yezzir!,” just like Pharrell of the Neptunes.

What will likely help them succeed is that—entirely unlike the Beastie Boys in the eighties—the Cool Kids are “nerds who rap about actual nerd stuff,” in the words of one audience member. You buy stuff on eBay, but UPS takes it to the wrong house; you buy a bicycle and trick it out with black mag wheels; you want to make noise, you jingle your keys; you want to spruce up your pager, you put a little bit of gold on it. Lots of people buy stuff on eBay and almost everybody has keys. (Why has nobody asked the audience to jingle their keys before? Someone must have.)

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.